ASRock Z77E-ITX Mini ITX Motherboard Review

Intel Z77 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Performance Testing

There are a number of different Super Speed USB 3.0 host controllers out there. In order to know which ones perform the best we run a series of tests that will put the controller through the ringer and see how it comes out on the other side. Each of our motherboards uses a different Super Speed USB 3.0 controller and you can find the below.

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.

Testing of the USB3 was done using the “Thermaltake BlacX 5G Hard Drive Docking Station . The drive used was an Corsair Force GT 240Gb SSD.

Benchmark Results: Once again there is very little difference in the performance in CrystalDiskMark. The ASRock Z77E-ITX was only .6MB/s behind the top performance in the read test with a sequential read of 249.5MB/s, which coincidentally is a perfect match with the ASRock Z77 Pro3. The sequential write test does show a slightly greater difference in the boards, and the ASRock Z77E-ITX was the lowest scoring performer with a sequential write of 243.9MB/s.

HD Tune Pro 5.00 is an extended version of HD Tune which includes
many new features such as write benchmark, secure erasing, AAM setting,
folder usage view, disk monitor, command line parameters and file
benchmark.

Intel Z77 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 HD Tune 4.61 Read Benchmark Results

Intel Z77 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 HD Tune 5.00 Write Benchmark Results

Testing of the USB3 was done using the “Thermaltake BlacX 5G Hard Drive Docking Station . The drive used was an Corsair Force GT 240Gb SSD.

Benchmark Results: We aren’t surprised by the results in HD Tune 5.0, the performance of all of the boards in nearly identical, at least the average read scores are. The ASRock Z77E-ITX average read hit 260.9MB/s while our other boards hit 260.0MB/s, 260.1MB/s and 262.5MB/s. The average write performance of the ASRock Z77E-ITX motherboard was once again the lowest of the group hitting 233.7MB/s, compared to the GIGABYTE Z77-DS3H which hit 255.4MB/s, there is a pretty significant difference.